In this episode we have a very special guest – my dear friend Darren Danks. He is a geek, life coach, lover of comedy and laughing, British archery champion and holder of 9 national records. Darren had 3 careers – electronics engineer, IT support and now he has finally found his true path in life and mindset coaching by helping people. Darren is the greatest cheerleader, he always knows what to say, always has the best advice to motivate people around him and most importantly make them smile. He can help you to break through your limits and go after the life of your dreams. I am so happy and honored to have him on this podcast episode – he is a treasure. Check out for yourself in this brief summary of our talk or listen full interview on a podcast.
(1:47) Guna: Tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Darren: I work with people on mindset and confidence. I look at the whole thing, holistic thing. When you are working with someone to get through their blocks or issues or whatever the thing they come to me for, it has to be the whole spectrum approach. Not just limiting beliefs and things like that, but it’s also the language they use, energetics. What some people would look at as a new age woo-woo kind of things is becoming more recognized as a part of the system we need to use now to help people get out of their blocks and moving forwards to what they want in their lives
(3:38) Guna: Let’s get to know you as you. What are 3 weirdest things about you?
Darren: Weirdest? I Got to limit it to 3?
First one – I have seen UFOs.
Ghosts – I always had the ability to sense someone or something has entered into the room even if I don’t hear them.
Being British archery champion – I held 9 national records, I was a certified coach. I used to love it and I used to be very, very good. […]
(8:55) Guna: Why coaching, why entrepreneurship – how did you figure it out “Yes I want to do this online entrepreneurship thing and I want to do something for myself”? How it all started?
Darren: There are a number reasons why. Coaching side is something that I always got, always. Throughout my life I’ve always helped people, I have always known the kinda right thing to say to them. As I went through life, my 9.00 to 5.00 career, I realized I really couldn’t carry on doing that nine to five lifestyle because there is more in life, there is more into the world. Just something in my heart told me I should be doing bigger and better and greater things, tapping into the whole idea of helping people. And it led me to helping people literally around the world. […] All these events let me know and realise that this is a path I need to go on to.
(11:49) Guna: Mindset is something that you talk all about, it’s like your core point where to start, where everything begins. But so many people just ignore mindset – why do you think it happens?
Darren: The biggest thing is and most of us do it – none of us one to admit “We are wrong or broken”. I don’t believe anyone is broken but it’s how people feel about themselves. No one wants to admit that because it’s like failing on their part. You can go for gadgets but it’s all kind of surface fixes, they don’t fix the internal side of things. But when you look at the mindset side of things, that’s when you go deep. And a lot of people are scared to go deep. We all got these things on our mind that we bury or we put things over the top to hide them because we see them as something really big and difficult to deal with and we don’t think we are capable. Most people are capable. They just need guidance and a kind of secret space to allow themselves to deal with it. Giving someone space, a nonjudgmental space is one of the most powerful things we as coaches can do.
We all know ourselves better than that coaches do, yet a lot of times we are not given that space to explore ourselves. This is where the coaching comes in.
Then you create that environment and then you can start doing the coaching techniques just to guide people deeper and deeper and closer to their own solutions.
(17:25) Guna: What are the things that a person can do every single day to start a little more confident, happier life? Where to start? What are the things they should look into?
Darren: Many times people try to make these massive leaps. Massive leaps are too big. It’s like the difference between thinking “I’m gonna walk up that mountain” or “we could walk up that little hill“. Walking up that little hill and then the next little hill and then the next little hill is so much easier than going straight to the mountain. The small steps are big. There are few things:
- Being more caring towards yourself. We can be so incredibly self judgmental, the language we use ourselves can be hursh.
- Small language changes. You just put yet at the end. “I can’t do that, yet”. It completely changes that phrase, it takes it from the negative to positive. Just changing those perceptions.
- Stop watching the drama. Because we get so immersed and merged into all these drama that’s happening.
- Having conscious decisions can make big differences. A lot of times we go down the path.
- Permission to break out of the shell.
I can go on and on about all the small changes. The big things are really – look at the language you use on yourself, start actually accepting yourself for the wonderful person you are.
When you have these thoughts that you can’t do something, look back in your life to all the things you have achieved and give all those things validity they need to be given. When you look back at these things you realize “ Oh my God – I can do this, I have gotten strength, I have gotten power, I just need to do it again”.
(25:40) Guna: What would you suggest implement to the peoples life? Maybe it’s some morning routine or motivational video, maybe it’s journaling, implementing something healthy in their lives. Practical things that everybody could start to do?
Darren:
- Affirmation. Mostly affirmations don’t work because they are not being done correctly. That’s actually feeling that affirmation. Put the emotions into it. Put movement into it. What happens is – they work much better and there is a reason for that – the subconscious doesn’t truly know the difference between what is real and what is not. So if you tell your subconscious something often enough and you feel like it’s absolutely 10 000 % real your subconscious will believe it. And when your subconscious believes it, that’s what you become.
- Gratitude journal. A lot of people don’t feel they got much to be grateful for. I suggest every day write down 3 things that you are grateful for that day. Anything that makes you smile during the day. At the end of the week you look at it and you have 21 things to be grateful for. There really, truly are a lot of things to be grateful for, this is why I say – try to step away from drama, because the drama buries all these nice, thoughtful, beautiful, amazing things that we should be grateful for every day. But if you start to write it down – it’s there, you can’t get away from it. We could have a hundred amazing things happen to us in a day and one bad thing and as humans we would focus on that one bad thing and forget hundred amazing things. It’s kind of a survival instinct. That’s why we focus on that too much. The more you focus on positive instead of negative the ability grows to ignore the negative. That state of mind doesn’t come just like that something that you work on.
- The language we use on ourselves. When we use negative language with ourselves, we tell ourselves “I can’t do that”. It does 2 things: 1 – It tells your brain that’s reality; 2 – It sends the message to univers. Language – an intent for incredibly and powerful aspects to our lives and our mindsets. The more you tell yourself that you can’t do something you never gonna do it. It’s a language that we use to ourselves, an intent we put on it and how we perceive failure. Failure isn’t failure – it’s just a learning process. How we perceive things is so powerful and so important. It’s really about keeping things in your mindset positive. Try to crowd the bad things out with good things. Just start to add positive phrases, positive intentions, positive feelings, positive energies into your daily life and they will crowd out the negatives.
44:00
Lighting fire around
You can find Darren on online platforms as thedazdanks, here will be few of them:
https://www.darrendanks.com/
https://www.facebook.com/thedazdanks
https://twitter.com/thedazdanks
https://www.instagram.com/thedazdanks/